PRINCE GEORGE — Tim Morin had only minutes to talk to his father, badly burned in the explosion at the Lakeland sawmill, before he was whisked into surgery.

Allan Morin, whose arms were burned like “charcoal” from the elbows down, described how he survived in the heart of the explosion, Tim said.

“[Dad] made it out by running. He kept moving. He said he tried to find his way out the best he could,” said Morin. “He said he was scared. He said there was flames and smoke everywhere.”

He told his son, “I didn’t want to die that way.”

At the University Hospital of Northern B.C., Allan Morin, 56, has been placed in an induced coma which is expected to continue for a week, said his son, who has been keeping a bedside vigil.

While Tim Morin recounted on Wednesday his father’s tale of survival, the community was coping with news that a second worker had died as a result of the “catastrophic” explosion.

Glenn Roche, 46, succumbed to severe burns at the University Hospital of Edmonton Tuesday evening.

Contacted Wednesday morning, Roche family members said they were not yet ready to talk.

Alan Little, 43, was named Tuesday as the first fatality of the explosion and fire that destroyed the mill.

He died in the hospital at Prince George, where injured workers were taken after the blast.

Five, including Allan Morin, remain in the hospital.

Two victims are being treated at Vancouver General Hospital and another at Royal Jubilee in Victoria.

Morin described his father as having burns on his face, neck and arms, about 30 per cent of his body, doctors have told him.

“I’m just glad my dad is okay,” said a sombre Morin.

His dad had worked in an area of the mill where logs are placed into a machine that strips the bark off, said Morin, 32, noting it would have normally taken his dad a couple of minutes to get outside the mill.

That area is the eastern end of the mill where fire officials have described the worst of the blast hit.

The mill where his dad worked for 38 years — all of his life — was considered a safe workplace, said Morin.

But considering the explosion at a sawmill in Burns Lake three months ago, Morin is now looking for answers.

“I just want to know how it happened,” he said. “There’s never been a really bad accident there — no one has got seriously hurt. And all of a sudden there’s two people who lost their lives and there’s others fighting for their lives [who are] burned,” said Morin.

Sinclar Group president Greg Stewart, who came to the hospital, to see if he could visit with the victims of the explosion, had no immediate explanation for the explosion.

“I’m devastated,” said an emotional Stewart, describing the two deceased men as well-respected workers.

Little had been with the company for 18 years, the last two as a supervisor. Roche had been with the company 29 years.

B.C. Premier Christy Clark flew in Wednesday to meet with families of mill workers and thank firefighters and other emergency personnel for their work. “British Columbians are grieving with them,” she said at a news conference.

At the Lakelands site, a pair of crossed sets of daffodils was placed at the entrance to the sawmill.

“For those lost. Remembered always,” said the accompanying note signed by the Patterson families.

A pair of bright green and purple star-shaped balloons that fluttered in the breeze added the only colour to the backdrop of the burned metal skeleton of the sawmill.

Lakeland worker Darryl Kennedy had stopped Wednesday afternoon in his big red pickup truck to view the aftermath of the explosion.

“It’s kind of surreal. My whole life is tied up in this place,” said Kennedy, 40, who started work there when he was 18.

Kennedy, who worked in the yard on a log-loading machine had planned to go into the lunchroom that blew up, instead decided that night to get a coffee at a nearby gas station.

When he got back, the mill was in flames.

He was one of the five workers initially unaccounted for on Sunday night. Prevented from getting back on site, he couldn’t get to his cellphone in his machine, where dozens of desperate calls, including from his 16-year-old daughter, were sent to make sure he was okay.

Kennedy was a friend of Little’s, whom he remembers as a “genuine” man who loved gardening, science fiction and animals.

His friend had once tried to write a book, he said.

While he contemplates his future with trepidation, Kennedy said he also has questions about the possibility that fine dust from dry, beetle-killed timber was a factor in the mill explosion here and an earlier one in Burns Lake.

He noted the sawmill had a vacuuming system to collect dust, but that microscopic particles still hung in the air. “Shouldn’t there be a moratorium on beetle wood? This isn’t coincidence,” Kennedy postulated about the two explosions.

“It’s pretty scary stuff.”

Philomena Hughes, whose home was rocked by the explosion, came by to photograph the site.

She said the deaths of the two mill workers emphasizes how closely people are connected in the community of about 80,000, which has an industrial base but also a thriving university.

The wife of Little is a friend of hers, and she met a woman while swimming Wednesday morning whose son is “best friends” with Roche’s son.

“It’s just starting to happen — the ripple effects,” she said of the consequences of the mill’s destruction.

At the Coast Inn of the North, where the union has offered counselling for workers, Allan Morin’s cousin Doug Morin was waiting outside.

He was on shift that night, but got out without a scratch.

He said because you work for years with the same men on shift, you get to know them.

But a subdued Morin would only offer that Little and Roche were “good guys.”

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Prince George sawmill victims speak of the explosion, survival

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